Photography, Cinema, and the Post-Apocalyptic Ruin

Walead Beshty

I could not help thinking of the scene in which poor Gregor Samsa, his little legs trembling, climbs an armchair and looks out of his room, no longer remembering (so Kafka’s narrative goes) the sense of liberation that gazing out of the window had formerly given him. And just as Gregor’s dimmed eyes failed to recognize the quiet street where he and his family had lived for years, taking Charlottenstraße for a grey wasteland, so I too found the familiar city, extending from the hospital courtyards to the far horizon, an utterly alien place. I could not believe that anything might still be alive in that maze of buildings down there; rather, it was as if I were looking down from a cliff upon a sea of stone or a field of rubble, from which the tenebrous masses of multi-storey carparks rose up like immense boulders.
—W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Through the whole inner city run these streets… lined with houses that don’t seem to be made for living in but appear as a stone stage set for people to walk between.
—Walter Benjamin, Briefe I

It is… fitting that in the center of a monstrous house, there be a monstrous inhabitant.
—Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

In 1967, Ed Ruscha hired a pilot and a photographer to make images of what is arguably the most banal urban location. From a mile up, Ruscha dwarfed Los Angeles, recording a vision of the car-infested metropolis through the bombardier’s scope. The resulting book, Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967), confronts us with something between the formal repetition of serial geometry and aerial reconnaissance of urban sprawl, as if enormous Sol Le Witt wall drawings had somehow found their way into these cluttered landscapes. In a 1976 interview, Ruscha related his interest in this bird’s-eye view to a childhood desire to build a scale model of all of the houses on his early-morning paper route, a model he could "study like an architect standing over a table planning a city."[1] It was the emptiness of his neighborhood streets at dawn that inspired the young Ruscha’s fantasy, and subsequently found its form in the one restriction he placed on these pictures: that only completely empty lots be photographed. His aerial views of these mundane necessities of contemporary car culture propose an expansive landscape of desolately sprawling interstitial spaces: an endless maze of deserted parking lots, vacant thoroughfares, and evacuated strip malls. Ruscha’s images invite an uncanny imagining of these sites; a world where the vernacular is devoid of life, they place the cold angularity of minimalist aesthetics back into an urban milieu, forcing the esoteric investigation of seriality and the grid into the social field.

Ed Ruscha, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, 1967

Despite its contrivances, this collection of photographs is wholly dependent on a peculiar fact of Los Angeles life. Its size and seeming prosperity notwithstanding, downtown Los Angeles was virtually evacuated on weekends, when its commuter population returned to their suburban homes. This very phenomenon made downtown Los Angeles the perfect shooting location for the first post-apocalyptic science fiction film of the 1970s, The Omega Man (1971). At the time, no other city would allow the sweeping shots of Charlton Heston cruising around an utterly empty downtown blasting the Henry Mancini classic Theme from a Summer Place. The unnatural desolation of the film wouldn’t have been possible without incurring astronomical costs, but downtown LA was already emptied, already post-apocalyptic. The Omega Man’s very existence as fantasy signaled a real crisis of the American city that Ruscha recorded. These days one can imagine many suitable locations for the film, if only in the all too common dead downtowns of mid-sized postindustrial American cities. Detroit, Worcester, Newark, Springfield, or Albany, all would provide a suitable location for the escapades of Heston’s violently estranged flaneur. What the makers of The Omega Man noticed was that the city and the nascent anxiety of the science fiction film backdrop were becoming one and the same.

The late 1960s and early ‘70s were marked by a radical change in the character of the American city. Caught in a state of violent flux between the swift decline of its old localized industrial base and the rise of multinational corporate formations, its inhabitants were increasingly polarized by class, race, and politics. Not restricted to the city street, this conflict spilled out into our collective imaginings. The American city came to embody the uncertainty of the time, as both the literal and symbolic site for the clash of social and political ideologies. The road movie, whose run through the seventies was kicked off by the surprise hit Easy Rider (1969) and was followed by films like Vanishing Point (1970), Zabriskie Point (1970), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and Sugarland Express (1974), directly addressed the desire for escape from the confines of modern life. The troubled inner cities and the humdrum safety of suburbia inspired a yearning for the freedom of the open road and the simplicity of small-town living. This retreat, however, did not ensure the happiness it promised. The characters populating these films often found themselves alienated and detached, finding only temporary solace in the territories between urban hubs. More often than not, what they end up finding, and are subsequently destroyed by, is more terrifying than what they sought to escape. Away from the norms, mores, and control of modern society, life becomes just as Hobbes surmised, "nasty, brutish, and short."

Stills from Easy Rider, 1969, Zabriskie Point, 1970, Two-Lane Blacktop, 1971, and Sugarland Express ,1974

Most remarkably, the early seventies saw a return to the long-ignored genre of the disaster film. These films provided the opportunity to escape through the cataclysmic collapse of the familiar, allowing us to relive historical catastrophes (as in the 1975 film The Hindenburg) and imagine future ones (Earthquake, 1970). Although the disasters varied in their form (either natural or manmade, either future or past), the message remained the same: mankind’s hubris would, inevitably, be its own undoing. The brave new world of fifties Americana morphed into the fantasy of its collapse. As it progressively isolated itself in tract homes and suburban shopping malls, the American middle class fantasized about death, all too aware that the war machine of the forties was directly responsible for the availability and low cost of new comforts and the total protection they promised. Though the counterparts of suburban utopia and postwar prosperity may have been the atomic bomb and the Holocaust, the destruction that ravaged other parts of the world had made it only to the margins of an American sensibility. Moreover, westward expansion itself was paved by the labor of the "invisible" and racially stratified migrant working classes. As the environmental historian Patricia Nelson Limerick duly notes, "‘the price of progress’ [in the American West] had registered in the smell of burning flesh."[2] An undercurrent of apocalyptic anxiety thus found its way into the mass-cultural fantasy of the television set and the movie screen. In this context, the disaster film provided the perfect escape from historical memory: from the ashes of total catastrophe we could begin anew.

Jacques Derrida has suggested that ours is the age of the post-apocalyptic. By the time mass culture became cognizant of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, and Stalinist purges, the apocalypse was no longer the object of morbid speculation, but a familiar historical fact. The lesson was that the worst we might imagine happening already has. In this way, the apocalyptic fantasy constitutes a restaging of historical trauma, permitting its sublimation into commodifiable packages, allowing an escape into a state of amnesia. It was probably the distinctly American version of this phenomenon that inspired Jean Baudrillard’s book America. Baudrillard describes the American West as a desert containing ”cities which are not cities:”[3] “Irvine: a new Silicon Valley. Electronic factories with no openings to the outside world, like integrated circuits.… By a terrible twist of irony it just had to be here, in the hills of Irvine, that they shot Planet of the Apes…”[4]

But it seems the philosopher of the simulacra missed the intimate connection between the landscape and the fantasy for which it was a backdrop. It wasn’t irony that led the shooting scouts to choose Southern California for Franklin J. Schaffner’s ape-infested vision of the future so much as an understanding of the origins of the fantasy itself. They could no more depict the exact dimensions of that cultural phenomenon than step outside themselves; they could only narrativize the desolation, re-present it as metaphor. In this case, the shooting scouts understood what the estranged Frenchman seemed unable to, that, even in a hypertrophic world of simulations, behind the facade of fantasy lies the monstrous presence of the real. The post-apocalyptic film finds itself stranded at the intersection between the morbid fantasy of the disaster film and the social alienation of the road movie. In The Omega Man, as the movie tag line indicates, ”the last man alive is not alone.” Heston stars as a relic of the once-vibrant city, haunted by vampiric figures whose barely alive bodies cannot withstand daylight. Heston is caught in limbo, resolute in his devotion to bourgeois urban life in the shadow of its complete disappearance, and intimately attached to a city whose last remaining inhabitants relentlessly hunt him down. Despite their nightly attacks, Heston continues to live in his penthouse apartment in the heart of Los Angeles, a personal monument to technology and culture. Engaged in a schizophrenic relation to his social world, he sips fine wine and listens to Bach in the evening, then roams the streets with his machine gun hunting the other inhabitants of the city. The communal order of ”the Family” formed by these post-apocalyptic night owls is a social group where class and race distinctions are remnants of the past. Blatantly parodying the promise of communist/socialist revolutionary movements, the solution offered in their communal life results in total de-individualization, a fate that Heston’s character comments is ”worse than death.” Heston’s pursuers embody his dislocation from the urban milieu that defined and once surrounded him. At the climax of the film, and the height of its absurdity, Heston is crucified on a piece of modern sculpture, arms spread out and head tilted down in a Christ-like pose. The only remnant of the once-bustling metropolis is erased with the memories of its last devoted inhabitant. With him, the symbolic order of the old city is eradicated.

In the summer of 1972, in the midst of the Vietnam War and on the cusp of one of the largest recessions in U.S. history, Stephen Shore ventured beyond the few square miles of New York City by car for the first time. His project, to photograph his way across the country, led him through the wide-open spaces that Shore later described as a ”flat nowhere place of the earth.”[5] Instead of photographing the landscape or its exotic subjects as so many photographers had before him, he turned his attention to the city. Away from the tumultuous cultural milieu of Manhattan, the emptied avenues and vacant intersections he found on his trip became his chief photographic concern. One typical image of an intersection, 6th and Throckmorton St., Fort Worth Texas, June 13, 1976, is loaded with characteristically haunting signs of absence. Traffic lights and street signs issue messages to drivers and pedestrians who aren’t there. A bus stop, what appears to be city hall, and a corporate high-rise surround the places where people are expected to be but aren’t. In the background, we can see the evidence of new construction, a crane atop a concrete endoskeleton, but the desolate streets tempt us to ask who will fill the empty form. The trappings of modern life become unwitting proxies for our isolation and anxiety; traffic signals continue to regulate nonexistent flows, buildings reach skyward with blank windows, and the bus shelter waits defiantly in the sun, all haunting the scene with their readiness to be activated. One might speculate what it would have required to produce such an image in Shore’s native Manhattan. Hollywood first attempted this feat three years ago when, for one unprecedented day of shooting for Cameron Crowe’s psychodrama Vanilla Sky (2001), Times Square was emptied of everyone but Tom Cruise. The director thought the impact of a completely abandoned urban center was an almost priceless spectacle. The Hollywood motto of ”bigger is better” came full circle, as it was not the multitudes of choreographed extras that constituted the blockbuster money shot, but the equally choreographed evacuation of Times Square’s 200,000 daily tourists. Shore didn’t have the advantage of a Hollywood budget: neither the support of city government to enlist uniformed officers to keep crowds at bay, nor the tortured wailings of a Tom Cruise to heighten (or perhaps lessen) the mood of the scene. The impact of a city devoid of its inhabitants is compounded by the fact that at the moment when Shore stood on the corner making his photograph truly no one was there. Cruise’s dream sequence had already become a reality on that sunny day in Fort Worth. The resulting image presents us with a document of this momentary coexistence of fantasy with the reality of the city. It seems that in the early seventies the inhabitants of Shore’s vision, like Heston’s assailants, had developed an allergy to daylight.

It’s the frenetic pleasure of urban life and the interactions of its pedestrian actors, traditionally associated with the appeal of the metropolis, that have drawn multitudes to New York City. This opportunity for flânerie has also made its streets the subject of many photographers, including one of Shore’s most prominent contemporaries, Garry Winogrand. His attraction to the movement of the anonymous masses is what probably led many critics to refer to Winogrand’s street photographs as testaments to the character of urban life, ”a casting inventory of the essential city of modern experience.”[6] Winogrand’s images contain an almost typological collection of characters who operate as stand-ins for the urban population as a whole. We can identify ”the Madison avenue executive, the cripple, the little old lady, the beggar, the celebrity, the artist… and the crowd.”[7] As photographer and longtime friend of Winogrand Tod Papageorge has posited, Winogrand’s images ”describe… a sort of urban minstrel show, full of interlocutors, end men, shimmering women pulled in from the wings, bald one-liners, missed cues, and a steadily growing gallery of the blind, the halt, and the fallen.”[8] Unlike Shore’s quietly spare images, Winogrand’s richly populated frames attempt to represent the pathos of American urban life in the sixties through the direct representation of its subjects. For Winogrand, and Robert Frank before him, each photograph became a theatrical space – a world of characters, struggles, and emotion. Take the overwhelming disaffection of Winogrand’s image of American Legionnaires. A man, presumably a veteran of some past war, crawls toward the camera with stomach-churning desperation, as his fellow citizens gaze obliviously over his head, engaged in their own personal dramas. Underlying this image, like the majority of Winogrand’s street tableaux, is the seeming disconnectedness of the people involved, each photograph presenting a gray wasteland of social relations.

In Shore’s work, anxiety is marked by the complete absence of interaction, and it reflects not only on the state of the cultural uncertainty of the Vietnam era, but also on our very ability to represent this situation at all. The result is that Shore’s photographs are occupied by the haunting absence of Winogrand’s rich assortment of personalities. In contrast to the high-pitched drama and visual irony that Winogrand offers, Shore’s images evoke the sense of a stage set that will never be filled. Take the storefront of U.S. Route 10, Post Falls, Idaho, August 25, 1974. The two open doors appear to be caught in mid-action, as if the occupants of the cars had suddenly evaporated in the afternoon sun – evoking the 1978 film Night of the Comet, where Haley’s comet turns the population of Los Angeles to dust. Or Shore’s image of a campsite in Jackson Wyoming, September 2, 1979, which feels like a modern version of the infamously deserted early American colony at Roanoke, whose inhabitants left only the elliptical phrase ”Gone to Croatan” on a nearby tree. In a recent conversation, Shore noted that his book Uncommon Places (1980), composed of images from 1973 to 1979,[9] ended up being edited in such a way that many of the city views including people were left out. The book’s effect is a serialization of this absence. As you turn each page, a new image compounds the emptiness of the one before. When one comes upon the few portraits in the book, it’s surprising to find that they demand the same type of attention as the architectural views, as though the people in front of the camera were an intersection, a building’s facade, or a strip of asphalt. They, too, seem to be waiting, poised on the edge of an occurrence like the city that surrounds them, a similar sense of piercing desolation haunting even Shore’s images of family and friends.

Bernd and Hilla Becher once likened Shore’s work to that of Eugène Atget, the canonical French photographer of pre-Haussmann Paris, whose images Walter Benjamin famously noted made its streets appear as though they were the recently evacuated scene of a crime.[10] As the Bechers go on to say, Shore’s project, like that of Atget’s, was initiated on the historical cusp of radical social change, anticipating the disappearance of a certain type of urban vernacular.[11] In Atget’s case, this disappearance was the result of Napoleon III’s desire to modernize and control the population of Paris through the demolition of labyrinthine medieval streets and the construction of grand avenues. Shore’s project marks a similar shift of economic and social life: in this case, from the centralized urban downtown to the decentered planned communities of suburban sprawl. Just as Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris privileged surveillance and police accessibility to ensure social order, the suburbs offered safety in the form of largely homogeneous and economically stratified populations insulated from each other by an artificially imposed city plan. Noticeably absent from Shore’s archive are expansive views of the surrounding landscape, where those who were able to would eventually relocate. It is here that Robert Adams defined the core of his project. In the photograph Untitled (Panoramic View), thousands of white roofs fill the landscape as far as the eye can see, so that the tall buildings of downtown Denver appear as a mere blip on the horizon. One could imagine Shore’s image of Fort Worth looking similar, if only he had followed Adams’ lead and stepped back about ten miles. Punctuating the landscape that inspired the long views of nineteenth-century photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins are houses laid out at equal intervals, like rows of jewelry boxes in a department store display case. Their presence is an alien one, almost as if they had been expelled from the landscape that they now obscure. Although the evidence of life is there – as much as a sequence of virtually identical boxes can indicate life – the inhabitants are conspicuously absent. Most important, the serial repetition of these houses is the result of the same technological infrastructure that allowed for the mass production of picture magazines and advertising. Each repeating identical box is the product of the same modernist industrial dream that gave photography, and its nearly infinite reproducibility a decisive role in the dissemination of ideology in the 20th century. The circulation of images of attractive people living attractive lives in their attractive tract homes seduced young families who sought the security of homeownership and an escape from the increasingly troubled urban centers. In this way, the circulation of the photograph is directly implicated within Adams’ work. His vision of an ordered wasteland of mass-produced homes is inextricably tied to the complimentary role photography played in the formation of mass subjectivity.

Eugène Atget, *The Panthéon,* 1924, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Often Adams’ most direct images are his most haunting. In the photograph Tract House, Denver, Colorado, 1973, the mute exterior of the building and its darkened windows betray nothing of its interior. Our desire to gain access to the house through its many windows is met with the harsh contrast of the noonday sun. A peek around the side of the house reveals more of the same – staggered facades present themselves as equally blank, and equally frustrating for the voyeur. When Adams does photograph inside these buildings, as in his image of the claustrophobic wood-paneled corner of a tract home, there is no correlation to an external world, no opening from which to escape the enclosure (even the well-placed mirror, a potential break in the gloomy walls, only reflects more paneling). This image, like others in Adams’ oeuvre, calls to mind a comment made by Ed Ruscha regarding his interest in Los Angeles. As Ruscha explained, ”Los Angeles to me is like a series of storefront planes that are all vertical from the street, and it’s almost like nothing is behind the facades. It’s all facades here – that’s what intrigues me about the whole city… the façade-ness of the whole thing…”[12] The facade can be thought of as an architectural analogue for the photograph, a scrim or screen that alludes to an absent interior, which might explain why photography was the medium Ruscha chose to describe the urban vernacular of LA. It’s easy to imagine that, like the empty streets, the rows upon rows of houses in Adams’ images are empty as well. We find ourselves in a world of sprawling identical homes, inert and resolute in their repetition, a deserted backdrop for social life.

Robert Adams, *Tract House,* Denver, Colorado, 1973, Yale University Art Gallery

Adams shot over 5,000 pictures of the sprawling Denver suburbs, choosing to live in a tract home identical to those he photographed for the many years that were required to complete his project. Fully immersed in this environment, he remained hostile to it, commenting ”I object strenuously to such houses as places in which human beings are meant to live.”[13] Yet he continued to live and work in the conditions he found so reprehensible. Reflecting on an early experience of a depopulated coal town, Adams said, ”the hills around were cut by abandoned coal mining roads… it was brilliant, silent, full of ghosts… it had something Hitchcock about it.” Adams transposes this sense of hauntedness to the suburbs of Denver. But unlike the coal-mining town enshrouded in reminders of its now-distant past, the tract homes have little or no nostalgic potential. Spaced evenly through the landscape, they lack the American ghost town’s aura of history, yet still they’re haunted. Whatever the reasons were to move to the suburbs, they no longer matter. In Adams’ work, the fantasy of suburban utopia seems to have been severed from its roots. Like a lingering ghost, desire and memory have become separated from the body that once supported them. What Adams recognized was that the suburbs themselves were a surface, an apparition, an image and an index of a cultural mythology. Despite the endless flow of suburban traffic (as he once lamented, ”the cars never stop coming”), Adams continued to produce views devoid of people, as though the place itself precluded their existence. Even after all this time in one of the most rapidly expanding suburbs of the seventies, Adams still saw ghosts.

Filmmaker George Romero shared Adams’ morbid fascination with suburban life. In the second installment of his ”Living Dead” trilogy, Dawn of the Dead (1978), he chose a newly opened regional mall in the suburbs of postindustrial Pittsburgh as the next backdrop for his macabre fantasy.[14] When Romero’s characters arrive at the mall, it has been overrun by zombies. But these monsters are not the standard fare of horror films. Romero’s zombies are the perfect citizens for the American vernacular, liberated from history and social constraints; they merely congregate and consume. Like Adams’ tract homes, they seem to develop spontaneously from the landscape. As Elias Canetti reminds us in his magnum opus Crowds and Power (1960), the masses of the dead always outnumber those still living.[15] Similarly, the select few who grace the covers of magazines, billboards, television, and movie screens are outnumbered by the unseen who consume these products. In Romero’s case, the undead masses resonate as the invisible working class of the American Rust Belt. As he maintained in a recent interview, ”They’re basically blue-collar monsters and they’ve always represented change.”[16] Outside media representations in mass culture, the unseen masses haunt the shopping malls and master plan communities, to which they were delivered.[17] It is a basic instinct that draws them back to the mall: as one of Romero’s characters surmises, ”This was an important place in their lives.” A similar question might arise about what drew the inhabitants of the homes in Adams’ photographs to Colorado, as if to the mythical visions of mountains found in common postcards, a memory of an image of a place.

There is a deep awareness in Romero’s film of the function of traditional genres like horror. As he states, ”I find there is an interest in horror because people think it’s a safe way to be made afraid – as opposed to relating directly to what has happened.”[18] For Romero, it seems, the most complicated relationship is that between media and its function as cultural memory. The irony, of course, is that the movie theater is itself a fixture of the postmodern mall, just another product it offers, but, as Romero is fully aware, one that plays a key role in the ”zombification” of its subjects. Its use as a backdrop not only questions the effect of a late-capitalist vernacular architecture that exists, as Rem Koolhaas once noted, exclusively as the location of consumption, but also the equally key role that cinema plays in the landscape of commodity culture and the colonization of subjectivity.

These visions of the postapocalyptic mark both the desire for and an actual break in continuity with preceding history. While there have been and continue to be such breaks, which constitute a massive redefinition across a multiple set of fields (as in far-reaching historical traumas such as the Holocaust), they often consist of a multiplicity of these minor breaks, which open up along a fault line. Such disruptions are evident even in the minute. In his book After the End (1999), James Berger comments that with a catastrophe like the Holocaust, the inability to describe its magnitude is replayed within every attempt at representation.[19] Every time we attempt to reclaim a past or re-create an experience, this fundamental separation inevitably occurs. Like earthquakes and their aftershocks, the magnitude of the social disturbance is registered as an accumulation of effects. Certainly, the Holocaust constitutes a deep tear in the Western humanist tradition, a rupture in the lineage of the Enlightenment. But even this holds only within the context of Enlightenment thought, for one could not lose hope if one didn’t believe in our distinctly European formulation of ethics and government, a social arrangement that lives on despite this horrific event for which it is responsible. Though similarly horrific events have passed, such as the genocide that ravaged Rwanda or Cambodia, their cultural externality precluded the reflexive questioning of our own social fabric. Even the deeply troubling foreign policies of the United States bore little impact on the American self-image.

The late sixties and early seventies were marked by a psychic shift, although we have no singular term with which to name it. It still remains that the social landscape of urban culture and the mechanisms of representation underwent violent redefinition manifested simultaneously in the complete reconfiguration of contemporary artistic practices and an equally complete reconstruction of the role that the American city played in our self-definition. It is no coincidence that the political climate of the American city underwent such radical change at the same time that it underwent new artistic investigation, or that photography and cinema became the medium of choice for those who sought to reevaluate the American vernacular. But this decisive turn indicates that a series of occurrences created a before and after, a confluence of events that disrupted the language we had used to describe our social context and forced a serious reevaluation of traditional forms. As an awareness of the politics of representation grew, the inhabitants of the city no longer provided an acceptable template for representing what it contained. While this development is easily located temporally and geographically, it eludes definition by a set of causes or a point of origin.

Often, as is the case here, we must allow the symptoms to lead us to the source. These fissures manifest themselves in echoes, in tremors, and as apparitions imbuing the mundane material world with a queasy sense of alterity, and touch – even if at times imperceptibly – every aspect of experience. This territory is the postapocalyptic, where past and future appear as a paradoxically endless present.

Here suburban sprawl can be the place where you live, and yet seem like a sequence of empty shells, or the heart of a city can exist for one blinking traffic light.

The catch-22 when discussing work such as this is that it neither tacitly supports the historical delusion and cultural amnesia associated with the late-capitalist commodity culture, nor engages in a meta-operation of critique or "revelation" of the internal repressive functions of mass-cultural fantasy: a conceit usually reserved for a certain brand of academic or theoretical practice unreflexive about its own role within the culture industry. That is not to say that the pervading hyperformalist, apolitical readings of the work of photographers like Shore or Adams and their contemporaries did them any service; in fact, quite the opposite is true. They obscured the distinctly political and social implications of traditional genre forms (like that of landscape) being replayed within the sixties and seventies in favor of inserting the work into a lineage of painterly aspirations safely removed from the most dire questions of the time. Unlike Atget’s archive of Parisian views on the cusp of disappearance, or Antonioni’s characters isolated in the cold concrete forms of modern architecture, the work of these artists grappled with a distinctly American social anomie while it was in the process of global export, directly addressing the power of the image as it usurped the power of place.

The author is indebted to Chinnie Ding, Wesley Miller, Robert Nickas, and especially Eric J. Schwab, each of whom offered invaluable commentary and advice throughout the course of this essay’s development.

Walead Beshty is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles and New York.

[1] Marshall Berges, ”Interview with Ed Ruscha,” Los Angeles Times, Home Magazine, March 28, 1976.

[2] Cited in Delores Hayden’s essay ”Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space,” in Todd W. Bressi and Paul Roth, eds., Understanding Ordinary Landscapes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

[3] Jean Baudrilliard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 123

[4] Ibid. p. 48.

[5] Stephen Shore: Photographs 1973–1993 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1995), p. 35.

[6] Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), p. 98.

[7] Ibid. p. 98

[8] Public Relations, exh. cat., intro. Tod Papageorge (New York: Museum of Modern Art; distributed by New York Graphic Society, 1977), p. 13.

[9] American Surfaces, published in 1999, consisted of pictures that arose from his first cross-country trip in 1972.

[10] Walter Benjamin, ”Little History of Photography” (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, eds., Walter Benjamin/Selected Writings vol. 2 1927–1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999).

[11] Bernd and Hilla Becher in conversation with Heinz Leisbrock, trans. Michael Robertson, in Heinz Leisbrock, ed., Stephen Shore: Photographs 1973–1993 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1995).

[12] Edward Ruscha, ”L.A. Suggested by the Art of Ed Ruscha,” in Alexandra Schwartz, ed., Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writing, Interviews, Bits, Pages (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

[13] Carol Di Grappa, ed., ”Excerpts from a Conversation with Robert Adams,” in Landscape: Theory (New York: Lustrum Press, 1980).

[14] Notably, his first film, Night of the Living Dead (1968), used a deserted farmhouse as the stage for the return of the dead. Both films were shot just outside of Pittsburgh, and one could imagine that, in the time between the films, the aging farmhouse was one of many replaced by cookie-cutter tract homes and regional malls.

[15] Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Noonday Press, 1962), p. 63.

[16] Richard Porton, ”Blue Collar Monsters: An Interview with George Romero,” Filmhäftet 119, 2002.

[17] It is fitting that just as the regional mall was displacing the traditional urban centers at the time of filming Dawn of the Dead, currently the regional mall is in the process of disappearance.

[18] Porton, Richard, ”Blue Collar Monsters: An Interview with George Romero.”

[19] James Berger, After the End: Representations of the Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 62.